


i saw your face in the mirror last night; blood stained your clothes, bags under your eyes

by walkingponder



Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Coping, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 00:09:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30131013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkingponder/pseuds/walkingponder
Summary: even living for centuries cannot prepare one for the death of their own child.( or: philza's outlook on things and grieving. )
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), Ranboo & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Technoblade & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson
Comments: 7
Kudos: 38





	i saw your face in the mirror last night; blood stained your clothes, bags under your eyes

**Author's Note:**

> ayo i haven't written a fanfic in probably about a decade, but my thoughts about the funky minecraft rp have made me unhinged. second person pov for the sole sake of 'i think it's fun to write' and angst for the sake of 'every day i have Minecraft Emotion.'
> 
> obviously my first time posting on ao3. not used to actually needing to tag my work with anything, but i'm trying my best out here.
> 
> ( title comes from 'awful things' by from indian lakes )

When you leave home, you pack all of Wilbur’s letters in a bundle kept in a satchel at your hip along with the other bare necessities for the journey. It’s been a long time, too long, since he last sent you anything, and even if your son is a grown adult with a storied life of his own now, you’ve grown accustomed to his letters. 

He’s never let up writing to you, never gone _this_ long without keeping you in the loop.

And you have a foreboding feeling. It took up root deep in the pit of your stomach, grew more and more the longer you went without finding an envelope with his scrawl on the exterior in your mailbox. 

You know that things have been getting worse, that he’s heading back into war again. That had kept you sated for a while. You _know_ war. You know there’s not much time to sit idle in the midst of what he’s doing. But all the same, you know just as well that there are little things you cling to, in the moments between battles where tension runs a constant undercurrent beneath your skin, in order to keep your sanity. 

Reading, music, art. Writing. Letters.

( You used to take up drawing schematics, blueprints for ideas you had -- things you wanted to build when you were free. )

So there’s only so long you can sit still, knowing he’s out there but not knowing whether he’s _okay,_ how he’s coping with a second war so close to the first. There’s only so long you can will your worries away with the excuse of him being busy.

Thus, you leave with his letters at your hip. Because you don’t know when you’ll be able to come back home, knowing what you do about the land Wilbur’s gotten himself involved in. Knowing that there’s no telling when you’ll be able to return once you touchdown.

Because you have a bad feeling. A terrible, terrible feeling.

And if you arrive to find your fears are correct, to find your son in a coffin, you don’t want these letters to be anywhere but at your side.

( Somehow. The reality is worse than if he had been six feet under. )

* * *

You soar silently, unnoticed, shoes making landfall in front of a hole covered up by cobblestone. Just seconds earlier, you had caught his brown hair ducking into the cavern and sealing it up behind him, because even though you had flown over the crowd which you could hear from the skies, you were only there for one person.

You are there for your son.

You seal the exit back up again behind you as you trail after him, and you can hear him raving from down the hall. It’s a voice you remember but isn’t familiar, the notes the same but the song so wrong. He no longer sounds like the boy you raised.

It’s suffocating.

And when you speak, Wilbur brushes you off, tries to smooth talk his way out of this like the salesman he is, like he is giving you a fucking _sales pitch_ on how _fine_ he is. But it all falls apart the second he actually turns around to look at you. Because a son knows when his parent is disappointed in him, because a child knows when they’ve been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

You try.

There is a manic desperation in Wilbur’s voice that is so very foreign to you. Sometime, between the lines of all his letters, between the politics and the wars and all the little details you’re surely missing, it ate him up inside. 

It ate him up and burned him inside out until nothing was left besides a shell of the man you raised, spitting words like toxic fumes, like it doesn’t hurt the both of you to hear. 

( You wonder how much pain he’s in. )

For months, your son has fanned the flames of a nation, built up L’Manberg and you’ve warmed your hands on the warmth of his passion secondhand through his letters.

And now he wants to stomp it all out.

You try.

It makes your heart ache, because not a flicker of anything rises in Wilbur at your words. He does not sway or falter in his resolutions; he made up his mind long before you followed him here, long before he himself stepped foot in this room. 

Your son has always been so very stubborn.

( And, you wonder. When would you have needed to leave to not be too late? A day, a week, a month? )

You try.

You’re moving the second you catch his arm raising, rushing for him.

( Not to stop him from pushing the button. Because you know-- you know you’re too late. )

You grab his shoulder and pivot around Wilbur’s stunned form, fan out your wings to protect every inch of him. He does not pull away, but he does not hold you back either; he finds no comfort in you feeling your feathers burn away like driftwood, flames and shrapnel eating at your back, for his sake. Explosions ring in your ears and rubble falls down around the two of you, but his words form a mantra that echoes so much louder in your head.

( When you look over your shoulder and see the carnage, observe what he’s done, you can hear him let out this little overjoyed exhale, clear as day. Like he’s received the finest gift, like he’s amazed by his own magnum opus -- a crater. )

( Your brain pours over the letters you’ve memorized in the seconds of stunned silence, wondering when exactly-- which sentence, which word is when you lost your son. )

And you’re only just barely processing that, eyes half-seeing and feeling blood in your ears as you stand back to check Wilbur for injuries, when your son presses a sword into his hands.

You try.

Wilbur has always been so very stubborn. 

You try.

He is desperate and begging and taunting. His voice shakes with something that will take you years to unearth, his hands with adrenaline. You want to bring him home; you want to bundle him up and fly him home with you and run your fingers through his hair until he gets some fucking sleep because he looks like he hasn’t slept in days and never think again about how your son is asking you to kill him.

Your son is pleading for you to kill him.

( But you cannot bring your broken son home. Not on your broken wings, not when you drop the sword and he scoops it right back up to press it into your hands even more insistently. )

You try so fucking hard.

And yet.

And yet.

You fail.

( You curl yourself protectively over your son as he bleeds out by your own hand; your wings attempt to fan out again, but the burnt remnants of the limbs can’t manage it anymore. His blood seeps into your clothes, under your fingernails.

And he dies with a smile on his face, looking proud and satisfied. 

You do not cry. But you want to. )

* * *

( You regret. You regret. You regret. And you regret. )

* * *

You stay in L’Manberg. Not because you really want to, but because you want to _understand._

You _need_ to understand -- why Wilbur sacrificed so much for this land to the point that it broke him, that it haunted him so badly that he needed to destroy it and himself with it. There has to be a reason-- something, _anything,_ to explain why your son is gone and he didn’t even get a fucking funeral. Schlatt, who you think you know well enough from letters, got a funeral after everything he did. But not Wilbur. Not a fucking thing for Wilbur. 

You see Wilbur in L’Manberg’s perseverance. In how platforms bridge over the crater and allow houses to begin anew on them, stubborn and unyielding. 

You see Wilbur in how Tubbo attempts to steer L’Manberg right again, in how he tries to rally broken people together to build something great. 

You see Wilbur in your dreams, waking and sleeping. You wake up with his voice echoing in your head. 

( Sometimes, you do not sleep. You stay up some nights hunched over your desk with Wilbur’s letters sprawled out in front of you. And you pour over them again and again, analyzing every letter, word, sentence, paragraph for answers. When did things go so wrong, is there a point where you would have been able to drag him back from the brink of his own destruction--

You only end up watching the sunrise with bloodshot eyes and nothing else to show for it. 

You never feel any closer to understanding. )

You see Wilbur in bits and pieces everywhere; Ghostbur wouldn’t _need_ to be here for you to be haunted by his memory because your brain does it more than well enough on its own. But still, you see Ghostbur nonetheless. Ghostbur, an echo of your son from a time long ago. He reminds you of when your son was small, before he was worn down and broken and tossed out to dry, before he lost all of that childlike wonder.

And all the same. He’s not Wilbur. Maybe, more than anything else, he’s not Wilbur. There are fragments-- there are hints. But when you look into Ghostbur’s eyes, you do not see your son, not quite. You listen to him and do not hear your son, not quite.

He’s an echo, a mocking, living imitation that unknowingly reaches into your chest to rip at your insides every time he speaks. 

But you try. 

You try to make him happy. You humor him the best you can, you boost him up and sprinkle little white lies to see the ghost smile because maybe, if you see it enough times, you’ll stop thinking about blood dripping from your son’s smile with his dying breath. Maybe, if you listen to the ghost sing, you’ll stop thinking about your son’s unfinished symphony.

( It does not work. It does not help. )

You watch around you as L’Manberg starts to devolve from its glory, as the nation follows in its founder’s footsteps and wonder if maybe it should have died with him to start.

You watch as L’Manberg puts you under house arrest -- ( and in your head, you make some sad crack about how _finally_ you have _real shackles._ finally, real shackles to match the hands of guilt that latch around your ankles. ) -- and attempts to execute your best friend, your partner, the only person in this goddamn land that you have left on your doorstep.

And you…

You think you start to understand why Wilbur wanted it all gone.

And something bitter and angry and tired starts to take root inside you. Because all that pain, all the anguish-- Wilbur broke himself to build up for this country and then tear it down, only for it to re-corrupt itself again.

As you sit and bide your time waiting for your chance to escape, you cannot help but feel he died in vain, that all his brokenness was in vain. That your son pushed a sword into your hands and begged for death…

All for nothing.

All for nothing.

( When you escape, when you step into the arctic with Techno close by your side, protective and stable, you feel some semblance of freedom for the first time in ages. You feel like breathing fresh air for the first time after only breathing smog.

And if the two of you stumble into his home, exhausted and worn, and you share a rare hug and, unbidden, a whispered, shaky _“thank you”_ with too many meanings to truly put into words leaves you. 

Well.

That’s just between the two of you. )

* * *

You and Techno don't talk about it. Not in the traditional sense, not in the "you break down, pour your heart and all its contents out on the floor at his feet" sense.

That's not how you two work.

After so many years side by side, so many years watching each other's backs, you don't need that. Why put into words, awkward and often failing, when one can act, because you know anyway?

So the two of you don't talk about your dead son. 

You don't have to.

Because sometimes you shoot up out of bed with the feeling of Wilbur’s blood on your hands, under your nails, seeping into your clothes. The ghosts of his final words still ringing in your ears like the ruin of his symphony's notes. 

And sometimes you'll get up and go to the restroom in the too-early hours of the a.m. and scrub your hands under hot water, the weight of your sins embodied by the ruined wings on your back, until your skin is red. Even freed from house arrest, you are still left with shackles of your own design.

And always, on those nights, Techno will lumber out of his bedroom and find you like that, hunched over the sink with your red hands clenched together white-knuckled like you’re praying to some deity for something, _anything,_ to make this make _sense._ To bring your son back.

And he will find you; he will turn off the water and gently make himself known, even though you know the sound of his hooves on the floor better than your own heartbeat, and lead you away. He leads you back to your bedroom, or sometimes to his, and sits the two of you down and runs his thumbs over your shaking, heated palms until they cease trembling. 

And he does not ask. 

He just looks down at your hands with this sad, thoughtful gaze -- intense like how when he’s pouring over a new book or thinking up a new war strategy, like he’s trying to solve a problem. But he always comes up short. He never has an answer, never has a solution.

( And who could blame him. Who has the solution to a father’s grief? )

So instead, he just sits there with you. Sometimes, you hold each other. Other times, you ask for a distraction and he tells you about mythology, about battles won that you’ve already heard before but will take anything over the silence of your own mind. 

( One time, you have your chin tucked over his shoulder, his arms around your torso, when you don’t manage to catch a sniffle before it leaks out. Your throat is thick with tears that you refuse to let out, have _been_ refusing to let out. 

And the sound breaks the calming quiet of the room like shattered glass.

A quiet rumble from Techno that means worlds yields a simple: “I’m sorry.”

_\-- it means: i’m sorry for not seeing what path he was heading down sooner; sorry that his body was lost forevermore under the rubble of tnt, battle, and withers; sorry that you had to go digging through the destruction looking for any thread of him only to come up empty; sorry that your son is dead by your own hand; sorry that you’ll probably never fly again; sorry that you’re in so much pain and there’s nothing i can do to truly make it right._

You hug him tighter, nodding, letting out a raspy, weak: “Thanks, mate.”

_\-- because: you know him better than anything, you know that he knows you understood every depth of his spoken words. and you know that he’ll understand the depth of yours in turn._

Neither of you need to say more. Neither of you need to spell it out for it to be heard in perfect clarity.

And yet, you do not cry, not quite. You do not deserve to. )

* * *

You burn L’Manberg. You watch it crumble down, down, down until only the rubble of bedrock remains. It feels deserved, feels just, feels long overdue. In that moment, you feel the closest thing to closure. You scream that you’re doing this because this godforsaken country forced your son’s demise just like he forced that blade into your hands as you rain retribution down from the sky you used to be able to inhabit.

Because if there’s anything you blame for Wilbur’s blood on your hands besides you yourself, it’s L’Manberg. And you gave them a chance, gave them a chance to prove that they were worth something. That there was _something_ worth saving here. 

And they spat that chance back in your face.

So. You think your anger is deserved. You think this is for the best.

( You think, foolishly, that maybe your heart will ache less now that you’ve finished what he started, now that you’ve burned the music sheets of his symphony so they can’t be written any further without his consent.

You are wrong. )

When you arrive home with Techno, when the adrenaline has run its course and left you both wrung out, you realize that L’Manberg being reduced to a hole doesn’t change the one in your chest. You feel satisfied with a job well done, but the pain you’ve felt for months creeps it way back in again faster than you’d like to admit.

In the aftermath, among the silent tundra with your best friend by your side, you finally only find yourself wondering whether Wilbur would be satisfied to see the crater you’d left behind for his sake. 

You do not have an answer for yourself. You’re not sure you truly want one.

* * *

You, sometimes, think about how you brushed off Ghostbur’s anger in the afterglow of Doomsday. In that moment before he spoke, you’d had a delirious thought that the explosions had woken up your real son’s spirit from where it was hopelessly buried under the rubble, never to be found again. 

But of course, of course. It was simply the echo. And maybe you’re growing bitter towards the ghost who wears your son’s form but doesn’t feel like him, but it will not stop you from forcing yourself to run a sword through Ghostbur’s torso twice in the blind hope that your real son will come back.

He recites words that have haunted your waking and sleeping thoughts for months, and it makes you burn inside. But you do it for Wilbur, not for _Ghostbur--_ but for your son. Because for months and months you have wanted exactly this, to do anything to bring him back. 

And yet.

And yet.

You fail. Again. 

( That night, when you drag yourself home with Ghostbur’s fearful pleas of his second thoughts tasting foul on your tongue, when you finally notice that your hands have not stopped shaking for hours, when you walk in the door and rush away into the depths of the house without greeting Techno as per normal, you -- in the confines of your bedroom, behind the private solitude of a closed door, finally.

Finally.

Allow yourself to cry. )

You stop seeing Ghostbur after that, everyone does. 

You wonder after that if, in some cruel mockery of your grief, you killed Ghostbur too. Even though it shouldn’t be possible, if you killed even the echo of your son’s memory.

And it only makes your ache drill itself deeper into your bones yet again.

( Techno only comes in after the worst of your tears have subsided. Because he knows you better than his favorite sword, better than any potion recipes, and knew you hadn’t wanted him to see you in the midst of a breakdown this time. 

He knocks on the door, polite and gentle and all of the things most would never think him to be, and waits for an affirmation that he’s allowed in before he finds you sitting on the floor, pale and staring blankly at your hands like you’re haunted by something beyond anyone’s perception. 

And, probably, in a way. You are.

He mumbles something about how he’s made some of your favorite tea before taking your hands and curling them around the steaming mug. Half-cognizant, you sip at it and the swallows taste like sandpaper, like acid. But the heat eases, just a little, the rawness of your throat. 

And he sits down on the floor beside you, pulls you closer to him so your head rests against his side, wraps his arm around your shoulders, and does not judge the tear tracts on your face or the thick shaking of your breaths.

Quietly, even though he didn’t ask and never would, because he doesn’t need an explanation for your hurt, you offer: “We tried t’ resurrect Wil. Didn’t work.”

He squeezes your shoulders a little tighter and stays by your side as you ride out the unsung grief that’s been piling up, unquestioning and unyielding. The sole rock to cling to in your storm.

Neither of you talk about it the next day. You don’t have to. )

* * *

You’re not sure what spurs you to do it, to talk about it. To _really_ talk about it.

The snow crunches under your boots and shovels as you and Ranboo attempt to fix the damage that had been done to your mutual living area. The stars are twinkling above, Techno has gone back inside, and, by all means, it’s peaceful. The recruiting for the syndicate had gone over even more smoothly than you’d hoped.

And in your back pocket, you’ve taken to carrying a photograph of Wilbur you found forgotten amongst Tommy’s belongings that he left behind. You realize, listening to the other chatter about another new layer to his silk touch hands, that Ranboo never met Wilbur.

( Immediately after that realization, you wonder if that’s for the best. And your heart clenches at that thought, because you know, with the emotions that lived in your son’s eyes and the memory of his final breaths that haunt you day and night, he probably would have chewed Ranboo up like a dog toy. )

You wonder further then, what does Ranboo even know of Wilbur?

You don’t know what kind of stories they tell of him, what kind of legacy Wilbur left behind in L’Manberg’s verbal history books. Is he remembered as a great leader or as…

Well.

One thing leads to another leads to you showing Ranboo the photo of your son that you keep safe on your person. And handing it over so he can see feels like handing over something sacred. Even though Ranboo is one of the most careful people you know in these lands and he’s well within arm’s reach, you still have to swallow down a lump of trepidation that right here and now you could lose one of your few remaining connections to Wilbur.

And you talk about how you wish he would come back, how you miss him every day. How Ghostbur never really felt like your son, just an idealized imitation that could never stack up to the original. How Wilbur did some awful things, became a broken shell of the man he used to be and the boy you raised, and then forced a blade into your hands. How you lived through L’Manberg’s founding secondhand via his letters, came here when they stopped coming because you just knew something was wrong.

And you talk about regret, about wondering if you did the right thing.

( Because you think about it sometimes. It will never change anything, but just like every other second of that fateful day, you’ve poured over it hundreds if not thousands of times. You have wracked your brain over every alternative path you could have taken. )

“...If you think about it. What would he have done if you hadn’t? Would anything… would anything have changed? Y’know.”

Ranboo hands the photo back to you as he speaks, voice quiet and measured and thoughtful. In the back of your mind, you question where someone so young gained such insight, why someone his age knows how to speak so frankly about these sorts of things. And then he looks away, and you can look at his gaze and see the exhaustion. Something bone-deep and heavy like lead, how scars run down his cheeks like brightly painted signs to call out just how troubled he is.

( And you’ve thought about that too. If you had denied Wilbur his wishes, would he have run recklessly into battle with no armor? Dived in front of a wither? Would the end result still have been the same? Your son: dead.

And if you had refused, if he had died to the first thing that brought it to him, would you have then regretted not giving him what he wanted? )

Hearing it from someone else though, someone else who hasn’t spent months neck-deep in guilt makes it somehow easier yet harder to swallow. Like maybe, the fact of the matter is, you arrived at the worst possible time. You arrived at the nadir of Wilbur’s madness, far too late to have made a dent. 

Maybe, just maybe, there is nothing you could have done.

“...Yeah. Yeah.” The sigh that leaves you is deep and ragged, tired. Ranboo says you can try to find closure, that, in the circumstances, you made a choice and there’s not much you can do about it now but keep moving forward. And, really, you know that. 

You know that. 

You’ve known that for a long time.

Unfortunately. Hearing it from somebody else doesn’t stop your mind from whirring every other night or fill in the hole that's taken up residence inside your ribcage, from wishing you’d gotten to say a proper goodbye and hadn’t been too late to pull him back out of the hole he’d dug himself into. It’s not going to change the fact that you’ve memorized Wilbur’s letters while looking for answers, looking for signs. 

There’s a moment of silence, something weighted in its awkwardness, before Ranboo changes the subject back to the terrain repair and you bark out a laugh, fondly ruffling hair as the two of you go back to work. It’s familiar, the deflection and return to your easy jokes. The fact that you don’t talk about it, talk about any of this, with Techno isn’t _only_ because he’s out-of-depth with emotions or because the two of you rarely need words, after all.

But maybe, just maybe, the ache in your chest eases a little bit for the next couple days. 

You frame Wilbur’s photo and hang it in your house; and maybe you stare at the photo for a little too long, trying to rewrite that bloody smile in your memory with the one in the photograph. And maybe you let yourself into Techno’s house some nights because it’s too much to be alone with your thoughts, because sometimes just knowing he’s in the same building helps when the grief wants to smother you alive. Even maybe sometimes, the two of you sit on his couch all night and cope in your own separate ways in the comfort of each other's company.

( And maybe you still stay up all night sometimes reading his letters. Sometimes you are still looking for when you should have come for him, most of the time, you’re reliving. You’re refreshing his cadences and voice in your head, reminding yourself of the son you had before he died satisfied looking over a crater of his own creation. )

( Little by little, you cope. But you’re not sure how you’re supposed to find closure with all your regrets, not sure how you can ever truly move on. )

Because you’ve lived centuries; you’ve raised countries and empires and monuments, you’ve killed countless by your hand and died countless times by the hands of others. You’ve brought worlds to life, studying their scriptures, and then watched them fall with you. 

And foolishly, oh so foolishly, you had thought you’d experienced all the pain life could offer. That there was nothing new, no pain you hadn’t felt.

But nothing, nothing in your many years, could have prepared you for the pain of a father losing his son.

( You cope. And you suppose that’s just about all you can do. )


End file.
